Did Rolling Stone Snooker General McChrystal?
It was 2:30 Tuesday morning in Kabul, after a busy day of travel to Kandahar and meetings with top Afghan officials, when Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was awakened by an aide with grim news.
“There’s a Rolling Stone article out,” the aide told McChrystal. “It’s very, very bad.”
Forty hours later, McChrystal had been relieved of his command, his 34-year military career in tatters. Apart from a terse apology, McChrystal has not discussed publicly the disparaging remarks that he and his aides made about administration officials and that appeared in the article.
On Friday, however, officials close to McChrystal began trying to salvage his reputation by asserting that the author, Michael Hastings, quoted the general and his staff in conversations that he was allowed to witness but not report. The officials also challenged a statement by Rolling Stone’s executive editor that the magazine had thoroughly reviewed the story with McChrystal’s staff ahead of publication.
I have no idea whether Rolling Stone played by “the rules” or not.
But any public figure should assume that everything said to a reporter might end up on the front page of a newspaper. It might not be fair, but that’s life. If nothing else, McChrystal and his staff were insane to give this reporter so much access.
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Jesus von Mises
Perhaps Gen. McChrystal just realized that creating the conditions for stable and efficient governance in Afghanistan before 2012 U.S. Presidential election was a fool’s errand and decided to commit career suicide.
(Honestly, I don’t quite believe that theory. But it’s more logical than what he actually did!)
Jess Austin
It’s remarkable that someone who had risen to the pinnacle of a profession the primary occupation of which is CYA (clue for those without: I’m talking generals here, not the rank-and-file), would actually be so inept at C’ing his A. Maybe the Special Forces aura had heretofore protected him from the normal rough-and-tumble of military life (he certainly didn’t suffer for his part in the Tillman coverup). He should have known what happens to the nail that sticks up. Anyway, any number of yahoos will take credit for humbling the proud.
I was more disturbed by something I heard on the radio last night. Apparently it is SOP for one whose tenure at 4 stars is so short to drop back to 3-star benefits upon retirement. Of course the generous thieves in DC are now falling over themselves to rewrite the regulations so that this one-year wonder will enjoy 4-star benefits, whatever those are, throughout his golden years, while he simultaneously milks the media establishment and military-industrial complex for all he’s worth. Disgusting.
Stephen MacLean
The whole scenario beggars belief: in to-day’s society, one learns to be aware of one’s surroundings when speaking against conventional wisdom. To be so unguarded with the media in attendance is astonishing.
Fort Smith Sam
One rule of reporting.
Report.
Who, what, when, where… and sometimes why.
But never what it all means — that’s for the reader to decide.
Now you’ll be able to tell who’s a reporter, and who’s a tail-wagging, butt-kissing, face-licking pundit who just wants to be allowed into the party. To continue covering it.
Hastings may indeed be the only true war reporter we have left.
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